Cabbies should set their own course for fares

Proposals about Chicago's cab industry have been zooming back and forth like hacks through the Viagra Triangle at last call. Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to impose more rules on the already heavily regulated business. The city would require global positioning devices in all vehicles, and it would track moving violations, mandate credit card payment and limit drivers' shifts to 12 hours. This would come with a very modest fare increase, the first since 2005.

Bill Savage is a senior lecturer in English at Northwestern University.

A cab drivers' association responded with demands for a 22% fare hike, as well as other fees, including a “convenience charge” of $1.50 for credit card payments and a $75 “vomit tax” to compensate cabbies for expensive and unpleasant time spent off the street cleaning up when passengers leave their lunch on the back seat.

But we need to ask one question: Why does the city run the cab business? Licensing cabs is, of course, a revenue stream for municipal government, but the city licenses all sorts of businesses without setting their prices. If taxis are private enterprise, shouldn't the companies that own the cabs or the drivers who steer them decide on fare rates and structure?

Well, the argument goes, because cabs navigate the city streets, the city has a vested interest in safety. Which is true enough, but the vast majority of cabbies drive with care (they don't want to be in an accident any more than their passengers do). To write onerous rules based on a few bad apples is unfair.

The second argument is that the cab industry is the public face of the city, representing Chicago to out-of-towners and suburbanites. The city has to set prices to prevent price-gouging and cheating. By this logic, the city should also license and regulate bartenders and hookers.

My argument here isn't a plea for a marketplace free of government intrusion: Re-read Upton Sinclair's “The Jungle” to see what that looked like. But it is inconsistent to treat cabs as private businesses and yet let the government determine prices.

Of course, a fare hike would solve many of these problems without additional regulations. If cabbies could make a decent living—cover their daily nut and make a profit—in less than 12 hours, they would. Drivers don't work 70-hour weeks for fun: They do it because that's what it takes to make a living behind the wheel.

But “taxi fare increase” probably sounds too much like “tax rate increase,” the third rail (to mix urban transit metaphors) our cowardly politicians dare not touch. Perhaps the city could at least allow cabbies to collect their vomit tax, as the whole situation is kind of nauseating.

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